Social Justice in Libraries

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Young adult (YA) librarianship has received growing attention in the library literature over the past several years. However, the majority of writing on this topic has focused on the services provided rather than on the physical spaces where these services take place. As U.S. public libraries are evolving to meet users' changing needs, we are in need of new design principles that reflect how users are actually using and interacting with their library spaces. Physical design elements have a large impact on how welcoming and comfortable the library feels, making user-centered design a crucial consideration in serving teens.

Teens deserve an environment where they feel welcome and respected. Library staff members who work with teens believe this and want to help them succeed—in having their service needs met and in life. However, even with the best intentions, teen behaviors may sometimes make it hard for staffers to keep a positive and supportive attitude.

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Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy builds upon the Asset-Based Pedagogies that came before it but presents the need to not only affirm and connect to students’ cultural backgrounds, but also to sustain them through schooling.

A recent article in EdWeek, which covers K-12 schools, draws on a nationally representative survey of district leaders, principals and teachers to identify “The Teaching Strategies Educators Say Will Outlast the Pandemic.”

The findings won’t come as a shock, but they deserve our attention anyway. After all, what happens in K-12 invariably finds its way into colleges and universities.

This article is based on the opening keynote address of the 27th annual North Carolina Serials Conference. It discusses principles and practices of diversity, equity, and inclusion within the context of technical services. Emphasis is placed on routine rather than extraordinary activities supporting collection development, resource description, and discovery and access.

As library collections digitally expand, the demand for technical expertise provided by the elusive library Technical Services Department becomes more central within the library ecosystem. But what is Technical Services and what do we do? Technical Services departments are the black box of the library world that all levels of librarianship find nebulous. We only seem to take form to fix those pesky computer problems and create new ones, before disappearing into our backroom cubicles.

This poster designed by Gracen Brilmyer was created based on content produced in Dr. Michelle Caswell's Archives, Records, and Memory class at UCLA, Fall 2016. It outlines myriad white privileges that exist within core archival principles and theory and provides actions for archival communities, practitioners and educators to dismantle them. - from https://www2.archivists.org/advocacy/diversity-and-inclusion-toolkits/social-justice

This paper discusses activist archives within the context of community archives and the practices of archiving activism. Interference Archive (IA), a volunteer-run independent archive in Brooklyn, New York, is presented as one example of an activist archive. We explain the manner in which IA functions as a transmovement and prefigurative “free space” under Francis Poletta’s typology of movement spaces. Through this explanation, we illustrate how the structures of free spaces can help us understand the way activist archives forge connections between communities and the ways that they create new networks of solidarity through the archival process.

Participatory archive collection day events depend on the involvement of multiple groups of stakeholders who participate in the archives. However, there is little existing research on participatory initiatives that connect institutions to communities beyond literature that focuses on the logistics of such initiatives, making it unclear how archives can best connect to and serve communities through such initiatives. Using ethnographic field data collection and analysis, the role that the in-person collection day event plays in the construction of communities of records and memory in participatory archives was examined. Analysis of ethnographic observation data and semi-structured interviews shows that for participants, a sense of connection to community and to the archives is dependent on the collection day being an in-person outreach event. Findings also show that the event design can make some participants feel welcome while excluding others, possibly limiting the reach of the archives to diverse communities.

In 2020, UNLV Special Collections and Archives conducted an internal audit of collections, strategic plans, and programming in order to assess how well it is meeting strategic goals of being more inclusive and increasing diversity and representation. In a data-driven institution, how can assessment be used to advocate for resources focused on diversity, equity, and inclusion? In conducting this analysis, UNLV hoped to answer the following query: how is progress measured if the goal is to preserve stories outside the traditional narrative (white, male, cisgender, heteronormative, etc.)? This article discusses strategies for assessing diversity in special collections and archives.

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This article focuses on the role of LIS faculty and researchers in the aftermath of the 2016 presidential election. Key points include our responsibility to educate ourselves about marginalization and silencing; to help our students build theoretical, practical, and ethical foundations for engaging with communities in ways that prioritize their needs and uphold the values of the profession; to amplify the voices of people systematically targeted by the presidential administration’s policies and actions; and to engage in public discourse about the implications of current administrative policies as related to the core values of LIS, such as the right to privacy, access, freedom of speech, and intellectual freedom. The article draws parallels between social oppression, as demonstrated in campaign rhetoric and presidential policy, and institutional oppression within library spaces.

This issue’s conversation with Jamia Williams focuses on professionalism and how libraries refuse to get out of their own way.

Academic librarians, like so many others in the higher education and library sectors, have discussed equity, diversity, and inclusion for many years. A number of prominent initiatives have worked to address these issues across the profession and within individual institutions. Yet, libraries have struggled to make progress on these stated values, especially in meeting their goals of employee diversification.

The organizing led by Black Lives Matter activists in 2020 following the murder of George Floyd sparked an increase in demands for racial justice across the higher education sector. Many leaders called for an end to police violence and pledged to address their institutions’ history of racism. Academic libraries in turn have grappled with renewed attention to increasing the diversity of their employees, addressing retention issues, and fostering equity and inclusion for both internal and external constituents. Some have also focused their efforts on library practices such as increasing the diversity of their collections.

To better understand the impact of these national events and long-standing challenges on academic libraries, we surveyed 638 library directors in fall 2020 to examine how perspectives and strategies relevant to issues of diversity, equity, inclusion, and anti-racism evolved over the last year.